Primeur, a multi-national company, is a leader in Governed Managed File Transfer and End-to-End Security solutions. Primeur also offers total integration with WMQ File Transfer Edition, further extending its specialisation in adding value to WebSphere with SOA enabled products and services solutions.

Allan Somerville Brown:

Allan leads the Primeur business in the North America. Before joining Primeur, Allan worked for several years at IBM. Throughout his career within the company, he covered various management roles and worked on major customer accounts during his time as the world-wide sales leader for the IBM WebSphere MQ software family of messaging and connectivity products. Allan was responsible for driving the MQ business to meet its revenue targets.

Q1. Primeur has been providing the System z Community with solutions and services for nearly 20 years. Why do customers turn to Primeur year after year?

A1. Primeur’s first customers, over 20 years ago, were mainframe users. We and they have continued to believe in the mainframe and have invested accordingly, making sure that our software remains optimised for the mainframe, now z/OS and z/Linux. We work closely with our customers to ensure they continue to achieve an excellent Return on Investment both technologically and functionally – for instance our recent File Services Governance solution for providing platform independent audit, compliance and governance for corporate wide file transfers regardless of protocol.

Q2. We continue to see Primeur expanding globally, at a time when the economy is extremely challenging. What’s your secret?

A2. Yes, despite a difficult economic climate, our company continues to grow. We believe that there is a tremendous business opportunity in the market in which we operate not only for helping our customers reduce operational expenses, but also in bringing batch processes into a SOA environment. When we think of SOA, we generally tend to think of on-line transaction processing. However, most of the enterprise mainframe environments use batch systems so our customers are asking "when I transform to SOA, what about the batch applications and systems?" Primeur’s experience with mainframes, batch file processing and WebSphere puts us in an ideal position to help answer that question.

This makes it an opportune moment also for Primeur to invest in the future. Earlier this year, we announced the expansion of Primeur in the United Kingdom, and we opened a new subsidiary in the Asia Pacific region (Sydney, Australia) Since May, I’ve had the pleasure of serving as the Director of Primeur’s first North American office, located in Virginia.

Q3. Why is being part of Destination z a valuable community association for Primeur?

A3. Being part of destination z is a very valuable community as it affords Primeur access to the wide experience through collaboration with customers and IBM. Perhaps the best way to understand fully the value of System z and value of destination z is to watch the video, recorded at Impact 2009 by Peter Sedgwick our director of the new UK company. This can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pHV04EsiaM

Q4. Why is System z important for Primeur’s customers?

A4. Batch/Legacy applications are best run on system z as it is optimized for handling these applications and the way that these applications communicate is through files.

Very large numbers of files are processed and sent/received every day. The increasing focus on securing sensitive data means that systems z’s outstanding security capabilities make system z the ideal platform for processing files. Customers can take full advantage of system z to process and secure the key data used to run their business, safe in the knowledge that Primeur’s software will securely deliver the files to the desired destination reliably and in a timely manner. Primeur’s Governance solution determines when the batch file is ready to be sent and tracks it to its ultimate destination, thus ensuring audit and compliance. One can’t run a business without secure and reliable processing of data – the combination of system z and Primeur’s software ensures that customers can rely on the efficiency, accuracy, and timeliness of their core data processing.

Thank you to Allan for sharing his thoughts. Join me again when I continuing blogging on my journey to Destination z!